Multi-decadal vegetation transformations of a New Mexico ponderosa pine landscape after severe fires and aerial seeding

Wildfires and climate change are having transformative effects on vegetation composition and structure, and post-fire management may have long-lasting impacts on ecosystem reorganization. Post-fire aerial seeding treatments are commonly used to reduce runoff and soil erosion, but little is known about how seeding treatments affect native vegetation recovery over long periods of time, particularly in type-converted forests which have been dramatically transformed by the effects of repeated, high-severity fire. In this study, we analyze and report on a rare long-term (23-year) dataset that documents vegetation dynamics following a 1996 post-fire aerial seed treatment and subsequent 2011 high-severity reburn in a dry conifer forest of northern New Mexico in the southwestern United States. Repeated surveys between 1997 – 2019 of 49 permanent transects were used to test for differences in vegetation cover, richness, and diversity between seeded and unseeded areas, and to characterize the dev..., The vegetation data collection method followed the line-intercept method (Mueller-Dombois and Ellenberg 1974). Vegetation transects were approximately 50 meters in length and the data collected included herbaceous foliar and basal cover of all live and dead vegetation to the nearest cm. Plants were identified to the species-level, when possible, otherwise plants were grouped by their genus, or unknown plants were grouped by their growth form (see below). This line intercept method records the number of canopy-cover centimeters per species, and therefore allows for overlapping total vegetative canopy cover more than the total transect length. In cases where combined canopy cover for an individual species exceeded 100%, these species values were constrained to 100%. Canopy cover is reported as a proportion of the number of centimeters recording live foliar cover of a given species or growth form relative to the length of the transect. Bare ground is reported as a proportion of exposed soi..., , # Data from: Multi-decadal vegetation transformations of a New Mexico ponderosa pine landscape after severe fires and aerial seeding

## Description of the data and file structure

These data represent 4 samples of a 22 year time period: repeat observations of vegetation cover from the Dome Wilderness in New Mexico, from 1997-2019. Fundamentally, these data represent species and ground cover at a cm-resolution, recorded along 50 meter line intercept transects. The description of column names are as follow:

Transect: Site ID
Year: Sample ID
Code: 4-5 character code relating to species or ground cover category
RevBI: Burn Severity Index as reported by initial BAER estimates
TRT: Treatment - seeded or unseeded
Full_name: Latin name of species or genus, or full name of ground cover category
Origin: Native or Non-native to the Dome Wilderness, NA for ground cover categories
Transect_cm: Total length of the Transect in centimeters
Growth_form: Functional group of plant species, genus, or c...